Richmond, Indiana to Marysville, Ohio

Today was our last official "century" ride of the entire trip. We will have rides to come in the 90+ mile range, but today was technically the last 100+ mile ride of the entire trip. The ride today was a 104 mile long adventure.

We left Richmond, Indiana, on a very overcast morning today. Rain had been predicted as a possibility, and I surely thought that it would come. Happily enough, we never received any rain from the ongoing very threatening skies. Nice. (Even though it was very overcast all day, I still wore more than plenty of my sunscreen.)

Richmond, Indiana, is almost on the Ohio border. We found ourselves at the "Welcome to Ohio" sign at only 2.7 miles on our cue sheet this morning! That was neat. Prior to this adventure, the only states that I had fully biked across, from west to east, were Iowa and Wisconsin. As of today, my list now also includes California, Arizona, New Mexico, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. (We were also in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas on this trip, but those were not full state crossings.)

It is neat to think that I am back again in Ohio. This is my state of residence from my infancy to young adulthood. I grew up and lived in Painesville, Ohio. Many, many great memories. We will be perilously to Painesville in a couple of days from now, then when we are at Niles, Ohio.

Today's ride involved a whole lot of scenery that was honestly pretty much similar to that of Illinois and Indiana. If you ask for details however, I feel that the corn was higher in Indiana and Illinois than it is here. I don't know why that would be the case. There was no rain here today, but they must have had a lot of rain recently. Indeed, some of the corn fields today look like a rice paddy.

I did see some people of the Amish faith today. A horsedrawn buggy went by, going the opposite way on the other side of the road. All inside were smiling and waiving at me. I waived back, of course. I had the feeling that they were more pleased to see a bicycle than yet another gasoline user.

It seems that most people in Ohio own dogs, generally large ones. Quite a number of dogs had really unpleasant statements for me as I rode by today. They don't seem to like bicycles. I don't know why. Fortunately, they were fenced in or otherwise physically restrained.

Most of the cyclists on this trip have pretty high-tech bike computers. One of the guys has a really fancy Garmin bike computer. At the end of each day of riding, he downloads data from his GPS-enhanced bike computer to his separate laptop. The laptop then has software which interfaces with Google Earth. This is far more technology than a luddite like me can understand, but it turns out that he can generate, on Google Earth, a map of the USA with our actual route superimposed! That seems so neat! He made this into a picture and shared it with all of us today. That photo is directly above on this post, just below the "Welcome to Ohio" photo. (The one with the remarkably handsome gentleman.) This map is current to today's location at Marysville, Ohio.

I will end this post now, so I can get something to eat. Tomorrow will be a 97 mile ride to Wooster, Ohio, so I need to eat up, and rest up, starting now.